Explorations of Defamation and 101 Ways to Lose a Friend:
In this post-modern world of imagined biography and fictional memoir, its harder than ever to tell what is made up from what is real. Of vast interest to me and my process is the ever increasing grey matter of defamation, fact, fiction, faction and fantasy.
In a recent article in the Australian www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23458847-5012694,00.html Australian writer Helen Garner had this to say on the nature of writers and their truths: She (Garner) once cast writers as “voracious monsters, ravening beasts who roam the world seeking whom and what we may devour.” She then continues with; “The desire to preserve or capture something strange, something intriguing, may over ride respect for privacy or dignity, restraint or caution. It may even block out the memory of your rush to squirrel away a moment before it perishes. There’s a helplessness to the surrendering, as if once possessed by an idea or a phrase you’re not entirely responsible for its pursuit.”
Following a criticism of the young Garner jotting down notes beside a graveside at a funeral Garner confessed, “I’m a bit horrified by me at the funeral”, Garner says a little later. “In an awful way I can completely believe I might have done such a thing, but it’s a horrible image of what writers are like. There’s a need to take the observation away and brood on it, sort of steal it. To take notes at a funeral seems appalling.”
Still, I wonder if this is the necessary process of the writer. Throughout the course of my own writing (my book specifically, now in its 6th year of conception) I have lost some 5 friends. Friends that did not want their lives to be documented. Or at least not documented in the way that I see as authentic.
On a similar vein Garner had this to say, “I had an urge to own those feelings. I didn’t make them up. While I was writing (The Spare Room) I thought, “I’m going to look really bad in this book, there’s no redeeming this kind of awful, ugly emotion;, and I thought , “I’m not going to change it. I’ll call the character Helen and admit those feelings.’ I think this is a reason why people write. They want to put a piece of them out there and see if it can be embraced.”
Similar to my own process in that in an age of smoke and mirrors—facebook and myspace come to mind—both social networking tools where photoshop and the advantage of time provide users with the opportunity to edit themselves. To present themselves in a way that may not be entirely authentic. In theory these social networking tools are providing users with an opportunity to express who they are to the world at large, when in actuality what is happening here is users are taking this as an opportunity to present themselves to the world in an idealised way—the way they’d like to be.
It takes great courage and drive to present yourself in a manner that may not be viewed upon fondly—by friends, colleagues, family, what have you.
Heralded for stating that every time she writes book she loses a husband, Garner has now lived on her own for the past decade, suggesting that perhaps …’ the solitude of writing doesn’t sit well with marriage.’
Hillary McPhee, one half of the McPhee Gribble publishing house that launched Garners career thinks Garner is “much more considerate that earlier, when she’d probably say she did blunder in because she was inventing a genre.”
Garner agrees: “I regret trampling through peoples lives. In the past I’ve hurt people, wounded them in fact by writing about them in ways they didn’t like. Other people have loved being written about. You never know which way someones going to take it so that’s been a problem for me right from the start. One person in particular hates my guts… I’ve realised there’s nothing I can do about it. That relationships been destroyed.” There’s another writer who speaks off the record, calling Garner a “scab picker”, a “User who takes everything and gives nothing back.”
This informs my own process profoundly as I mentioned earlier that during the course of writing my book I have “destroyed” some 5 relationships, relationships I thought strong and long lasting. The notion of writing nonfiction brings with it a myriad of problems for those people whom you have invited into your life. A writer is hardwired for details and authentic narrative. A writer choses to live their life in a way that could, at any moment, be documented, is being documented. It can be incredibly hurtful and frustrating as you come to learn not everyone is hardwired that way and not everyone cares to be confronted with a version of themselves they are not yet ready to see.
Similarly, New Yorks art world has been agnosing over the ethics of entitlement since Annie Leibowitz (Annie Clever Bitch, as my mother refers to her) exhibited photographs she took of her partner, Susan Sontag in the days before her death and during the hour immediately afterwards. Sontag’s son, David Rieff, felt his mothers memory was “humiliated”. Critics cringed at Leibowitz’s reckless juxtapositon of painful, private images with glossy celebrity portraits. Garner hasn’t seen the Sontag pictures but reckons Sontag knew that Leibowitz never had a camera out of her hand. “Sontag could not possibly have thought that Leibowitz would not be taking her photograph.”
The artist is relentless, seamless in the persuit of their art.
Similarly Australian photographer Carrol Jenna was often criticised for constantly sticking a camera in the face of unwilling suspects. A penchant that ultimately served her well as she photographed her own demise from a mystery liver inflicting illness. A truly brilliant and brave expose on the voyeurism of the artist and their own sense of self. I have infinite respect for Carol Jenna.
Similarly with the detailed death of Garner’s friend in The Spare Room “She would’ve understood my need to tell the story. She was a person who was not squeamish, she was a person of courage and she was out there. I don’t feel that’s a betrayal.”
Interestingly, however, the ending of a friendship does not secure a safe licence from defamation. The threat of losing a friend is often not enough to impede the writers urgent, necessary need to tell the story. It’s often perceived as voyeuristic cruelty. But is it really that cut and dry?
Garner once defined her work as hyperrealism and now feels the fit of autofiction sits snugly. Quickly bored by “cloudy dreamings” Garner admits that “nothing sets her teeth on edge so much as the revving and grinding of someones imagination as they’re tryig to make things up.”
Peter Carey compared writers to magicians, conjuring “things up that never happened before.” Garner is sceptical. “I don’t believe that anythings totally invented… If you’re completely inventing a story there wouldn’t be an urge to tell it.” Her publisher McPhee points to the space between pragaraphs . “This is when the imagination happens.”
“I used to feel an obligation to invent things, says Garner. I felt I was a failure because I didn’t do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don’t feel that anymore.”
Writer and academic Elizabeth Webby once told Garner: I’m amazed at how much you walk around naked in public. Webby says the writer is “Prepared to reveal intimate, rather shameful things.” Things most of us wouldn’t cough up with a gun to our heads.
We defame ourselves a large percent of the time, it seems only natural to me that during the course of an entire career that same sense of defamation towards others is would become merely inevitable.
The bravery of the photgrapher chosing the photograph over the moment, the human engagement is by the by, ther objective is the photograph. Same also for the writer. No relationship is safe guarded. No anecdote “off the record.” With the exception of course, of those who stipulate strongly that their privacy be maintained or at best, their identities disguised. One of the “5 friends” I mentioned earlier had requested I not detail the specifics of the story she had shared with me of her horrific experiences as a child and a victim of incest. Even in writing this, as generically as I just have, I feel a sense of disloyalty towards her. I have of course, omitted anything of that nature from my book– suffice to say, I had never actually included it– So where do we draw the line? To people actually get off on the paranoid notions of being written about? Do people assume the worst while making too few inquiries? Whatever the answer, it’s a shame. Any kind of loss is tragic.
In end, Garner compares writing to a sickness, a neurosis, a mania. Fellow novelist Roger McDonald ticks off the motives for writing: love, hate, revenge, to win plaudits, or the simple reason that “I couldn’t keep the truth to myself any longer.” Like a primal scream, it boils up and spills out. There’s a therapeutic benefit to the lancing. “Life’s fairly excruciating. Painful things happen, says Garner. “Every now and then you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that’s how I work.”
3 Comments
April 28, 2008 at 5:56 am
This is a comment on this post and the one before. I think what you describe in these posts is true of a certain type of literature, but not true of literature in general. In particular, I think that this is a strange argument to make: “During the process of writing my own work of literary nonfiction I have grown convinced that all “novels” are indeed, works of nonfiction”. This sounds to me like an artist who paints self-portraits saying: “In the process of painting my self portrait, I have grown convinced that all works of art are indeed, self portraits”. It’s a truism, I suppose, that all writers only have their own experience to draw on; but it’s far from a truism that what they ultimately end up writing about is exhausted by their experience. Garner herself compares her writing to the great Australian panoramic novels, as you quote her, and it certainly seems to me that her form of writing, as you describe it, is very different from the work of for example Patrick White. I read his Riders in the Chariot recently, and while I am sure there is an interesting story to tell about how he researched the novel, one that involves various aspects of his biography, the novel is simply not about him. It’s about Australia, race, the imagination, the landscape, Sydney, the suburbs, the nature of artistic genius, madness, history, and so on. I haven’t read Garner, but if her work has value I have no doubt that even if the focus is on herself, and even if it draws heavily on observations and little on the imagination, the value it has is a result of the writing somehow transcending these limitations. Well that is probably too strong — it’s not that I have no doubt, but rather that I’m expressing my own attitude towards the value of fiction. And one value is that it is not non-fiction, but fiction! Now of course I am curious about who these five are who have not been happy about appearing in your writing…
May 16, 2008 at 1:32 am
A hearty response…
It’s a truism, I suppose, that all writers only have their experiences to drawn on; but it’s far from a truism that what they (writers) ultimately end up writing about is exhausted by their experience.
Absolutely. I find myself often reading things exhausted by the writers inexperience (Elizabeth ‘Eat, Love, Pray’ is one such recent example). It’s obvious to me. Another example of this is an ex-flat mate who is (to my knowledge) still writing a novel set in Morocco about a young Muslim woman who becomes a victim of rape during her first sojourn abroad. Dangerous territory thinks I, for a white Anglo Saxon male who’s only ever spent a fortnight or so in Morocco and knows nothing of a Muslim woman’s experience, and nothing of rape. Write what you know, right? Or as Helen Garner has said, “…Nothing sets my teeth on edge so much as the revving and grinding of someone’s imagination as they’re trying to make things up.” Not that I feel Elizabeth Garner is “trying to make things up”; I find her work naïve, that’s different. To me, however, it’s really obvious when someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Painful almost to read about someone’s crash course in culture—I was there for 5 minutes and this is what I saw—experience. It irks me. Still, become the change you seek, desho? I’m finding I’m critiscising things a lot less now that my deadline is looming so closely. Interesting, ne?
Your mention of Patrick White’s ‘Riders in the Chariot’ strikes a chord. I’m embarrassed by how little White I have read. Still, your comment that the novel is simply not about him, it’s about Australia, race, imagination, the landscape… is of interest to me, as I don’t believe anything is really as one-dimensional as a “memoir” or “an account of my time in Japan.” Goodness, how tepid. I don’t think anything is ever written about just one thing. Ever. How can it be? Good writing needs to be textured. Have you read much Roland Barthes? Doxa and paradoxa? Death of the author? I like to think the author is just a vehicle for the reader’s experience. How many times have you revisited something and seen it in a different light? Albeit a city, a book, an album? We’re evolutionary creatures. We change our minds. We socialise with people that open different doors for us and hence influence our experiences.
Do you really see knowledge and experience as a limitation?
As for the famous 5… you know I’m not going to tell you that… People come and people go. It’s confronting as I was convinced these were solid relationships. But I’ve been wrong before. A good family friend often says, “You’re not the first person to fuck me over, and you certainly won’t be the last.” Gold.
May 16, 2008 at 1:33 am
Elizabeth Gilbert I believe her name is. And I’m sorry to defame her as I feel it takes a great deal of courage to write a book. Even a shit one.